Active forum topics

Intel hands off BIOS successor to trade group

The United EFI Forum will essentially try to pave the way for EFI to succeed the basic input/output system, or BIOS, inside PCs. The BIOS lets the hardware speak to the software. Though the BIOS was once relatively straightforward in its design, over the years it has morphed into a figurative bowl of spaghetti as it's been changed and updated to accept new technologies.
Advocates say EFI would make it simpler for companies to add improvements, while also enabling PCs to boot up faster.

Some members of the open-source community are currently promoting open-source BIOSes. Major PC makers, however, have not actively championed this effort. Executives at BIOS makers and chip giant Intel have said that more tightly controlling this element in a PC helps maintain PC security and stability and fosters competition by protecting companies' intellectual property.

Intel began to promote EFI in 2003 and wrote an initial specification. The United EFI Forum says it will come out with a 1.10 version of the spec by the end of the year. Other members include Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and BIOS specialists Insyde Software and Phoenix Technologies.

More in Tux Machines

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

Lumina Desktop 0.8.3 Released!

The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!
This is mainly a bugfix release to correct an urgent issue with the system tray on FreeBSD 11, but there are a number of other slight improvements/updates included as well. The full list of changes is included at the bottom of this announcement, but the notable changes are as follows:
New Panel Plugin: “Application Launcher“
This allows the user to pin the shortcut for an application directly to a panel.
New Utility: “lumina-xconfig“
This utility allows the user to easily enable/disable additional monitors/screens within the desktop session.
Fix the issue with transparent system tray icons on FreeBSD 11
Add support for the XDG autostart specifications.

Netflix has more than 50 open source projects

My team has become very fond of an open source tool called Browserify. It was originally designed to allow the Node.js modules to be used in the browser, but we’ve leveraged it as the primary component in our build process. Over the last year, it has helped us to turn our monolithic code into a set of independent, maintainable modules. Previously, we were concatenating a big file and maintaining subsystem independence using namespaces, so this has been a big change for us.

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.